Lex's blog

Some experiments with windows 7 virtual XP

Thu, 07 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

The new windows 7 RC has a cool feature called Virtual XP. Under the surfice this is just a more integrated version of windows virtual PC. One of the things that sparkeled my interest was the promise it could redirect USB devices. This would be very usefull for running old legacy hardware.

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Updated webskin

Tue, 05 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I spend some time to update the look and feel of the Travsys site. To save me some time and the lack the design skils, I decided to buy a skin package.

After downloading the package I could simply upload a singe zip file to the website. Once that was done it was faily simple to change the site to use the new skin. Only problem was the old site had the content imported from word, this caused the font to look ugly. After some cleanup action the results where very good.

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Upgrading website

Sun, 03 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Today I have upgrade the portal software behind the travsys website. We where running on DNN 4.5.1 and now its upgraded to 4.9.3. I did this because we did not want to lack to many versions behind. The upgrade had some problems mainly related to directory security. Eventually the upgrade went OK. The next step is to change skins, this is for a next round.

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Some Java experiments

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Today I have experimented a bit with a java to com bridge. The aim was to make the CCP accesable from a Java application.

After some webseach I found various free and comercial tools. Eventually I choose to experiment with com4j which is a opensource toolset to create wrappers between Java and com.

https://com4j.dev.java.net/

Look a the tutorial is looked like exactly what we needed, so first I started of trying one of the included samples. This was not very successfull as I got none of them to work. Later I tried to create a wrapper for the CCP using there include tool. This worked fine, so now I have a wrapper..

I wrote the following small text applicatio:

import com4j.COM4J;

//import ICCPApp;

//import ISession;

//import ClassFactory;

public class Main {

  public static void main(String[] args) {

    com4j.Com4jObject obj = ClassFactory.createCCPApplication();

    ICCPApp app = obj.queryInterface(ICCPApp.class);

    app.showWindow((short)7);

    app.openSession("test");

And tried to run it. Unfortunately whatever I did it always throwded an exception. Aftler long and frustation debug sessions I found the included com4j.dll needed to be regsvr32'd, I am still not sure why this is but this was one of the last things I did before its started working.

Now there is one issue left, It works when I run it under eclipse but when I start it standalone it still does not work. This is problly a missing classpath or other command line option I have to pass. Anyway I left this as an excercise for the reader.

Conclusion: It is possible to create I Java to CCP bridge.

Other comment I like to make, the same experiment but then to bridge C# .NET to the CCP took me less than 5 minutes!

Version info application and ClickOnce deployment

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Today I have expermented with Microsofts click once application installation technique.

We have an in house version information application that we use to keep track of the various version of the Global Connect product. This application stores its information in a xml datafile. As we sometime got questions like "I have module version x.y.z to which version of Global Connect does it belong ?".

My first thought was to store this xml file on our webserver and use a standard XSLT conversion to show it. I played with this for several hours but it turned out the XSL syntax was a bit hard to use for what I wanted to do with it.

Next I thought, hey lets try ClickOnce and put a version of this in house utility on the site. This utility is written in .NET 2.0 so in order to deplay it al that was needed is to check a few options in Visual Studio and publish it. Thats wat I did and yes, 10 minutes later I had a webpage with a RUN button that downloaded and exected our version utility.

In order to make it really work I had to spend another couple of hours, most difficult was to find out how to pass parameters to this application, I wanted to have it load the versions data from the webservers. Eventually I found the solution:

NameValueCollection nameValueTable = new NameValueCollection();
if (ApplicationDeployment.IsNetworkDeployed)
{
  string queryString = ApplicationDeployment.CurrentDeployment.ActivationUri.Query;
  nameValueTable = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(queryString);
  string v = nameValueTable.Get("load");
  if (v != null)
    frm.m_SourceFile = v;
  else
  {
    string url = ApplicationDeployment.CurrentDeployment.ActivationUri.ToString();
    frm.m_SourceFile = url.Substring(0, url.LastIndexOf('/') + 1) + "TravsysVersions.xml";
  }
}

You can try it for your self from the Knowledgebase - Versions page

2nd entry

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Just learning how this blogging module works.

First entry

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:00:00 GMT

Just setup the Blog module, I will try to add some usefull info from time to time.